Twitter Changed How We View Search Results

We use social networks mainly for 2 things: Post stuff or search for stuff. That is why the search bar for any social network is quite important since it enables you to find content that you are looking for or discover new content.

Twitter is a social network that prides itself on being live and a lot of breaking news nowadays are first reported on the platform. With over 500 million tweets published on Twitter, sorting these posts is one hell of a job.

Well the company used to rank the search results in reverse chronological order, Twitter decided to scrap that out and have a new system in place as explained in a blogpost. According to the company, they have replaced the reverse chronological order system to a relevance order system.

This is their argument: Amongst the flurry of search results a person gets from a query, he or she might not find what they are looking for in the previous system. They might be looking to understand the context surrounding the query and the results (most recent tweets from the previous system) could not provide the context needed.

Now, they will show results which will show tweets that will be arranged according to their relevance. This will be determined through a machine learning system which will provide results obtained from various sources.

Twitter also found out from their research that from the new system, people ended up engaging more with the search results and also spend more time on Twitter which is a good thing for the company.